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Primato pontificio ed episcopato dal primo millennio al Concilio Ecumenico Vaticano II: Studi in onore dell'Arcivescovo Agostino Marchetto. Edited by JEAN EHRET.

2014; Oxford University Press; Volume: 65; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/jts/flu130

1477-4607

Norman Tanner,

Catholicism and Religious Studies

As an author, Archbishop Marchetto, the honorand of this Festschrift, is best known for his articles and book reviews on the second Vatican council (1962–5), many of which were collected together in his Il Concilio Ecumenico Vatican II: Contrappunto per la sua storia (Liberia Editrice Vaticana, 2005). Contrappunto in the subtitle is the key word. Marchetto has been unhappy with the liberal interpretation of the council which, he alleges, has prevailed in Catholic circles and more widely. He has sought to emphasize the continuity of Vatican II with previous Catholic councils, especially Vatican I and Trent, and so to rebut the descriptions of rupture and revolution which, he believes, have underlain the prevalent liberal historiography. Linked to this theme of continuity in Vatican II, the archbishop has sought to defend the papacy against the threats of conciliarism and of encroachments by the episcopacy. Reinterpreting Vatican II along the lines of the archbishop's revisionism is the concern—explicit or implicit—of many of the thirty-one contributions to the Festschrift. Half of them are written in Italian, the others in German, French, English, and Spanish. The book begins with the preface by Cardinal Farina, which, somewhat surprisingly, does not focus on the present volume but rather reproduces the presentation which the cardinal gave at the launch of the archbishop's later book on the interpretation of Vatican II, Il Concilio Ecumenico Vaticano II: Per la sua corretta ermeneutica (2012). The cardinal concludes with a gentle reminder—which is also a key tenet in Marchetto's argumentation—that the ‘spirit’ of Vatican II cannot be separated from the decrees promulgated by the council as liberals, it is alleged, have been in danger of doing. The rest of the volume is divided into three parts: ‘Storia ed ecclesiologia’, ‘Primato pontificio ed episcopato’, and ‘Il “Magno Sinodo” e la sua dinamica’.